If a beating is an honor, what is a stoning?

Yesterday I wrote about an Egyptian Muslim cleric who told us that the beating of women was instituted by Allah to honor women.

If that’s “honoring,” then stoning must be the equivalent of a gold medal:

Rare Video Shows Taliban Allegedly Stoning Woman to Death in Pakistan

A rare video reportedly smuggled out of northwest Pakistan allegedly shows a woman being stoned to death by Taliban militants in the upper region of Orakzai.

Al Aan, a Dubai-based pan-Arab television channel that focuses on women’s issues, said it had obtained cellphone footage that it says shows a woman being executed because she was seen out with a man. The killing reportedly took place two months ago and was smuggled out by a Taliban member who attended the stoning, according to Al Aan. ABC News could not independently confirm the cellphone video’s authenticity.

The video, which seems to show a woman tethered to the ground as a group of men throw stones at her, is so graphic that ABC News cannot show it in its entirety. Parts of it air today on the 25th episode of “Brian Ross Investigates.”

“It’s difficult to know where and when it was shot,” says Gayle Lemmon, deputy director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council of Foreign Relations, in an interview with Ross, “It is consistent with videos that have been coming from Taliban-controlled areas since the ’90s.”

Lemmon says that when women “stray outside the line” in Taliban-controlled areas, they may “face severe punishment.”

“Women are respected as carriers of the family honor,” says Lemmon, “but they also pay the price.”

If that’s respect…

Lemmon’s last statement is nonsense, of course, as I pointed out yesterday. They aren’t respected, except perhaps in the perverse sense of “if you dress a certain way and accept a man as your keeper, you won’t get raped.” Otherwise, according to Sheikh al-Hilali, she can expect to be treated like meat left out for the cat. Some respect.

Rather, what happens to the woman in the video is a consequence of women being made to bear the burden of the man’s sexual behavior. The victim in the video was seen walking with a man, presumably not of her family. Doesn’t she know what might have happened, since a man cannot control himself? That made her a whore and dishonored her family, and so she had to die by being pelted with rocks.

Respect. Honor.

Like Hell.

LINKS: Jihad Watch has the full video (Fair warning, it’s very graphic) and also provides links that debunk apologists who claim stoning is not a canonical part of Islam.